Researchers Aim For Car With Auto-Pilot, But Would You Trust It?

It's been a dream of Earth's residents since The Jetsons made us
believe it was a possibility: true auto-pilot. It's alive and well in
some cases, but not all. Existing commercial airplanes have an
auto-pilot button that guides the planes controls based on the route it
needs to take, but that's relatively easy. There's no highway to
follow, no drunk drivers to watch out for, and no posted speed limits
to obey. Doing the same thing in an automobile is definitely more
difficult, as you can probably tell given that no auto-pilot car yet
exists for the consumer market.

But just because there's no car like that yet doesn't mean that
researchers aren't working towards that goal. A team at North Carolina
State University are hoping to expand upon the technology that already
parallel parks your car automatically and alerts you when you veer out
of your lane, eventually hoping to create cars that can stay in a lane
altogether without the help of a human driver. The team has designed
software that tells an on-board computer to stay aware of what lane the
vehicle is in, and it can even read road signs and keep a watch on
other vehicles that roll up beside of it. As we mentioned, existing
technology is only capable of finding lanes and sending the driver an
alert if they veer over; beyond that, it can't really help.

The technology is even different than that used in the DARPA Challenge,
which pits autonomous vehicles against one another in a bid to win a
race. Those vehicles require massive amounts of sensors and other
external hardware--stuff that would be impractical to install in a
consumer car. NC State's technology relies on "computer vision
programming, which allows a computer to understand what a video camera
is looking at - whether it is a stop sign or a pedestrian." The
solution also uses algorithms to "sort visual data and make decisions
related to finding the lanes of a
road, detecting how those lanes change as a car is moving, and
controlling the car to stay in the correct lane." The real kicker is
the system's ability to do this while avoiding other cars and without
becoming befuddled by multiple lanes.

The end goal? To develop a fully autonomous driverless vehicle. We're
talking about a car that can signal, slow down, pull off, etc. Another
important aspect here is the car's ability to react if the human
suddenly cannot. If a driver has a heart attack, becomes choked, etc.,
the car could take over and stop in order to avoid a catastrophic
event. It's a huge, huge goal, and we're not sure we'll live to see it
all fully come together in our lifetime. But who knows--maybe The
Jetsons dream will come true in time, and we'll all be able to take a
bit easier on the highway with Mr. Navigation at the helm.